How to Replace Alternator Power Steering Belt 2007-10 Hyundai Elantra

Hey, friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on a 2007 Hyundai Elantra. I'm going to show you how to remove the serpentine belt. This one goes around the alternator, the water pump, and of course, the harmonic balancer. It can be a very simple job. I'm going to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts or instructional videos for your car, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so right here, this is our belt that powers our alternator and our water pump. That also goes down around the crank or the harmonic balancer where we're going to be taking off. So we're going to need to take the tension off of this belt. To do that, the adjustment's on the alternator, you've got this bolt right here, this is the anchor bolt. This bolt right here, is the adjustment bolt and then down bottom there, see if I can get my pointer down there, all the way down there, there's another 12 millimeter nut, that's also an anchor bolt. This one right down there.

That might be easier to get to from the bottom, it can be done from the top as well but what you need to do is loosen that bottom one, loosen this top anchor bolt and then you can go ahead and de-adjust the alternator right there. So that's what we're going to do. We'll go for the bottom one first because it's the hardest to get to.

You don't have to remove this fully, you just have to have it loose enough to be able to rock the alternator or pivot it. I'm going to do this anchor bolt right here, staying with my 12 millimeter.

Once again, you don't have to remove it fully, just need it to be loose enough. Okay, there we are. Now I'm going to switch tools. Now I'm going to take a 12 wrench because it's easier to get in here, I'm going to turn this to the left.

There we are, I've got that up and out of the way now, you can try giving the belt a tug, that pulls the alternator. So there we are. Now there's no tension on this belt, I'm clear to remove the belt. I'm going to be replacing this belt, but it's always a good idea to inspect it either way. Of course, hold on to it so we can compare it to our new belt. So I just wanted to show you the original belt on this vehicle. Here it is. This is the ribbed side, the part that runs inside the pulleys, you can see how deep these grooves are, or the ribs. They go in very far. Odds are, this vehicle had a very loud belt squeal. The deeper these are, that means the more worn the belt is. It'll also be very thin and so you'll get more belt squealing in this way.

Here we have our brand new belt. I'm not sure if you can see the difference in the thickness of these but you can feel it if you had it in your hand, you would say, "Wow Len there's a big difference." I'll turn it, try to show you the ribbed side in comparison. As you can tell the ribs on this side aren't nearly as deep as the ribs on this side and this is, you know it's still nice soft rubber. This won't squeal, this right here is getting all hard and you know, the ribs are very deep so this is going to squeal. We'll get rid of this belt. We're going to go ahead and install a brand new belt on this vehicle. I just wanted to show you that, we'll move along.

Something you want to check before you go ahead and install it is just to make sure that the belts are approximately the same length. If you have one that comes all the way out this far, then obviously it's not the same belt. They come pretty close, the old belt's probably pretty stretched at this point, it's been around since probably 2007 so let's try this one right here.

Time to get the new belt on, I'm just going to slide it down in between here. I'm going to get it started on the top pulley there. Go around the alternator, there we are, perfect. Now we're going to go down inside the wheel well and we'll try to slide over the harmonic balancer pulley. My belt. There we are. Feels like it's 100% around this, check the top again real quick. Sitting perfectly. Sitting perfectly, wonderful. Okay.

We're going to take the alternator, apply a little bit of pressure, grab a small pry bar here, all I want to do is try to get this belt, try to get the alternator to move, what I do, when I go like this and I push the alternator towards the front of the vehicle I'm applying more pressure on the belt. If I go like this, I'm relieving pressure on the belt, okay? When you put this belt on, it's important to remember you don't want it super tight, you also don't want it this loose, this right here, that's too loose. Even though it's a brand new belt, and you did a great job, it's definitely too loose, okay, so you're going to want to tighten it. Once you have it tight though, you want to make sure that you can take that belt and you can twist it a little bit.

Where this isn't a very big space between here and here, you really shouldn't be able to twist it very much, but down lower where there's a longer gap between the two, you should be able to take that belt and give it a fairly good twist. All right. So I'm just going to go like this and get my adjuster. We're going to have to take out that adjuster bolt a little bit further to get it so it lines up. So I'm going to turn that out a little further using my 12 millimeter wrench.

All right let's see if that's far enough. Give the alternator a little push, that sets over, very nice. As you can tell we still have too much movement with our belt there. So I'm going to go ahead and snug it up a little bit more. Go back to my 12 millimeter, I know it seems crazy because I just finished loosening it up all this time.

Give this a little push, a little tug. We'll go just a little bit more, there isn't very much gap right here, so the amount of tension that I have there I should have it a little bit tighter than that. Of course there's always room for adjustment, who knows, once we start this up, we might notice that we either need to tighten it or loosen it again anyway. So, I think that, that feels much better. We'll give it a try. I'm going to go ahead, grab my 12 millimeter again, for the trail all I'm going to tighten is this top one and then once I realize that it's exactly where I want it to be, that's when I'll go ahead and make sure that I tighten up everything. Feels good, let's get our tools out of the way. We'll start it up.

So we ran it. We're making sure that the belt stayed inside the pulleys right where we put it. It's not off by a tooth, if your belt was hanging off all the way over here and you could see one of the teeth on the pulley, well you know you're off by a tooth. I'm going to take a peek at the bottom one there, the harmonic balancer, feels perfect, I didn't hear any noise from the belt so I would say we're good to go. All right, now that we know that the belt's properly adjusted I'm just going to go ahead and tighten up this bottom bolt. That's easy to forget but it's important not to, okay. So just make sure that it's tight. There we are, that feels good, perfect. Great job everybody.

So for replacing the belt, obviously you didn't have to remove the wheel, I did for video purposes, all you'd have to do really is just, you know, turn the wheel. If that gives you enough room to get in here and you can do what you need to do, perfect. If it didn't, well, take the wheel off, put the wheel back on, torque the wheel down to 80 pounds when you're done.

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